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When students, faculty and staff in Greeley-Evans School District 6 start classes Thursday, it will mark the beginning of a decisive year for two schools.

Franklin Middle School and John Evans I.B. Middle School both face the prospect of being taken over by the state, among other potential consequences, if they don’t improve after having spent the past four years in the lowest categories of the state’s framework for academic performance.

To their credit, District 6 officials have approached this year with the seriousness it deserves. At Franklin, a new principal has taken the reins and made significant turnover to the staff. At John Evans, things look better. Its performance has been on an upward trajectory already, and if the trend lines hold the school will move out from underneath the state’s mandate.

Franklin’s new principal, Chris Ingram, clearly understands what’s at stake for her school.

“We basically have a year,” she said. “With next year, we’re going to have to really focus on student data and placing students in the right interventions. We hired some talented staff we’re going to put in the right places.”

Under the Colorado Accountability Act of 2009, which established the state’s framework, the best schools receive a performance designation. Schools with lesser performance receive the improvement designation and the schools with the worst outcomes receive the priority improvement and turnaround. If these schools don’t show improvement within five years they face a bevy of potential state-imposed changes.

The schools could be closed. There could be another change in leadership and another churn of 50 percent or more of the staff. The state could recommend the schools become charters or it could recommend that the schools bring in outside management — possibly from a private company.

Only priority improvement and turnaround designations trigger the state to take action. Test scores and other measures from one school year are used to place a school within a designation. Those accreditations are not released until the following fall. That means there is a one-year lag. For example, bad scores in 2009-2010 might make a school priority improvement or turnaround in 2011-2012.

Franklin and John Evans have not yet received accreditation ratings for 2013-2014. And it is possible one or both will move up to improvement status, which would then wipe the slate clean.

Overall, 38 schools — about 2 percent — across the state face the same mandate as Franklin and John Evans. And two school districts, Karval Re-23 and Vilas Re-5, also have just one year to show improvement.

Still, in the half decade since the Accountability Act went into effect the state has never actually punished a school, and it’s not clear to us that the punishments really would work. There’s no guarantee another operator could do any better with Franklin than the district has. And we doubt anyone in Denver wants to take responsibility for the kind of demographic challenges leaders at Franklin face. For example, more than 90 percent of the school’s students receive free or reduced-price lunches, which is a key measure of poverty. For a variety of reasons, children who are raised in poverty require more resources to educate. In fact, because standardized test scores and other metrics often tell us more about a school’s demographics than they do about the performance of individual students, teachers or administrators, the best thing the state could do for Franklin would be to change the funding formula. We’d like to see the schools that have the most needs get the highest per-pupil allocation. But given the state of the political conversation in Denver about education, we’re not holding our breath for such a sensible solution.

That’s why we’re glad District 6 has acted aggressively to improve Franklin on its own. Ingram is a strong leader with an impressive track record. She’s also been given a free hand to pick staff she wants, which is why about 50 percent of the personnel at the school are new.

“She is very clear on what her role is, and she’s very skilled in getting adults to work together to make a difference for kids,” District 6 Chief Academic Officer Nancy Devine said.

That’s encouraging. And we know everyone at both schools will do all they can to boost performance, not only to meet the state’s mandate, but also because it’s no less than what the kids deserve.

“What we do know is that we have very smart students here,” Ingram said. “We just have to use our resources to the best of our ability.”